When tech becomes the best friend of the elephant, and the rhinoceros. The World Wildlife Fund is working on electronic systems in its worldwide fight against poachers. An e-book was sold on Twitter this week. Not Amazon…Twitter! 

The first cycle of headlines were about Apple’s CEO promising to make some iMac desktop computers in the USA. But a day later, some experts are realizing that a $100 million investment does not equal a manufacturing revolution. And a reason to love the tech beat: Where else would you meet a guy who used to be a senior official with the Russian Central Bank, who later moved into currency trading, but now is in Seattle trying to convert not rubles or dollars, but fake gold and diamonds from video games.

A Stanford study has found that you would think harder about saving for retirement if you could see just what you’d look like when you are older. If you just noticed your Instagram photos started looking weird on Twitter, you weren’t alone. It’s not a software glitch — it was more like “shot’s [being] fired” between the two social media giants according to Slate technology blogger Will Oremus.  

Facebook would like to become that set of shoeboxes in the attic: A place to store all your photographs, even ones you have no intention of sharing with any of your friends. It’s called Photo Sync and Google-Plus already has something like this. To be clear, you have to opt in. And while we’re talking privacy there’s this new patent, filed by Verizon.

We could be soon enterting a world with no more neon. Wake Forrest phyics professor David Carroll has just come up with a better way to replace energy-wasting light bulbs, using plastics and nanotechnology. And he’s bullish about buy in from consumers. Carroll’s plastic lights can be made into rectangles for office ceilings or bulb shapes for home, none of this loopy corkscrew business you see with compact fluorescents. When you factor in the energy savings, he believes they could be 25 percent less expensive than bulbs of the Thomas Edison variety.

On this day 20 years ago, a British engineer named Neil Papworth typed out “Merry Christmas” on a computer and sent it to the cell phone of a guy at a Vodaphone holiday party. This is said to be the very first SMS text message. Plus a debate begins in Dubai over the extent to which governments will have the authority to reign in, shape, and tax the Internet.

One moment terabytes of data are flowing through the Internet in Syria. The next minute, next-to-nothing. The digital lights went out in the strife-torn country on Thursday, with experts suspecting the Syrian government shut off the net as a tactical measure in its fight against the rebel uprising. You can’t hide from marketing that wants you to buy a smartphone. Who are the 40 percent of Americans who remain immune to smartphones and why?

Think of life’s most embarrassing moments. Now imagine that embarrassment multiplied thousands of times. At New York University, a technical foul-up meant that that hitting “reply all” to an email sent it to 40,000 people. It all started with one guy who just wanted to forward an email from the school to his mom. Some argue 3D printing is the next manufacturing revolution: Computer printers that go beyond flat images to squirt out three dimensional objects. But could it also start a revolution for a unique hobby? An engineering professor and pair of student brothers at the University of Virginia have built and flown a drone made out of parts from a 3D printer. Along with quick manufacturing capabilities, 3D printing drones could result in design improvements.

The hotel room lock that uses not a key but a card may present a big problem: A simple hack that can make for an easy burglary. It requires a $50 piece of hardware called a microcontroller. A software engineer showed off how to do it at what’s called the “Black Hat” hacking conference last summer. What is a black hat hacker? It’s the more mischevious version of a white hat hacker.